Award Winners 2012

BIOLOX® App and BIOLOX® motions: Consulting and Training of Surgeons with Interactive Media for the Handling of Ceramic Hip Joints

With the latest new media, smart phones and tablets, the possibilities of digital publishing have increased once more. According to the guidelines of the respective operating system, apps for the devices have to be created within their own programming environment. This means at least twice the effort for the producers of the contents. Adding internet and desktop solutions, the companies meet their in-house limits quickly when trying to send their messages with the lowest possible divergence loss to the digital world.

The CeramTec GmbH, world market leader for ceramic hip joints, faces the challenge to inform 50,000 surgeons about the characteristics of their high performance ceramics called BIOLOXR and about the specific operation techniques as well as to train them so that they can use these techniques. The company is not able to reach this audience suffi ciently with classical media.

That is why CeramTec developed the BIOLOXR App together with the Steinbeis Transfer Center Technical Communication – Paracam at the University Aalen. Numerous animations, operation movies and further media show the correct implantation of the BIOLOXR component. All animations as well as the interactive interface were developed by the Steinbeis Transfer Center Technical Communication – Paracam. The special thing is that the Steinbeis team developed a platform-neutral workfl ow which makes it mostly possible to create smart phone-, tablet-, web- and desktop applications out of a programming environment. This is a cost effective and time-saving way which comes close to the so-called cross-media and single-source publishing.

The award-winning development of the BIOLOXR App met the expectations of the project partners to a large extent. Thus they are working on a beta version of a second app which can offer completely new possibilities for the visualization and simulation of hip joints. Motion sequences of people are recorded in a studio with a motion-capture system and then transferred to a virtual skeleton. With the interactive 3D-presentation it is possible to recognize special strain and critical conditions of artifi cial hip joints directly. This is very helpful for orthopedists whose patients are increasingly younger and more active.